The Scenario
Four days out from a run of 15 events and a client just flagged two of them as potentially understaffed. Your task is to produce a cross-event crew assignment view before the end of today so the staffing coordinator can make calls in the morning.
You have the 15 project IDs in the planning workbook. Rentman has the crew assignments. The cross-event view has never been built.
The bad version:
- Open each project in Rentman, check the crew tab, copy names and functions into the workbook
- By project 10 the function labels aren't consistent — "Lighting Director" in one project is "LD" in another and "Lighting Tech" in a third
- You can't sort or count by role across inconsistent labels, so the gap analysis becomes a manual read-through
The staffing coordinator needs a call list by 8 AM. It's 5 PM.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the project IDs already in the workbook and fetches crew assignments from Rentman for each one in a single operation.
For each project ID in column A, fetch the assigned crew members from Rentman and write their name and function into columns B and C next to each project
What You Get
- One row per crew-project assignment, project ID repeated in column A
- Column B: crew member full name
- Column C: assigned function on that project
- Projects with no crew assigned produce a single row with UNASSIGNED in column B so gaps are immediately visible
- The flat layout lets you filter by column C to count how many of each role is covered across the full event run
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need scheduled hours per assignment to flag under-allocated crew
For each project ID in column A, fetch assigned crew from Rentman and write crew name, function, and scheduled hours into columns B through D
Function labels are inconsistent — normalize audio and lighting variations to standard names
Pull crew assignments for each project ID in column A, normalize all lighting-related labels to Lighting Director and all audio-related labels to Audio Technician, then write project ID, crew name, and normalized function into columns A through C
Some project IDs may have been cancelled — skip them and note it
Fetch crew assignments from Rentman for each project ID in column A — if a project status is Cancelled write CANCELLED in column B and skip it — otherwise write crew name and function into columns B and C
Full gap analysis kill chain: fetch all assignments, count crew per project, flag understaffed events
Pull all crew assignments for the project IDs in column A, write project ID, crew name, and function into columns A through C, count assigned crew per project in column D, flag any project with fewer than 3 crew as UNDERSTAFFED in column E, sort by column D ascending so the thinnest projects appear first
The staffing coordinator gets the call list without the five-hour project-by-project lookup.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the event planning workbook with your Rentman project IDs — then ask it to pull crew assignments across all events. If you also need crew contact info and rates for the call list, the crew roster spoke covers that.